Fanboy Planet: What was Marvel’s response when you first proposed this storyline?

JMS: They thought it was a cool idea. They still do. If anything, they're actually more happy with it now because it's got people talking about and buying the book more than ever.

Fanboy Planet: Are you implying that Norman Osborn has some sort of hypnotic power, or is his force of personality just that strong that he could overcome the previously virginal Gwen?

JMS: He has always been portrayed as a charismatic, strong-willed guy.

But look, can we get real here for a moment? Anybody out there who hasn't known at least one young woman who -- in or out of a relationship with somebody else -- hasn't made a mistake and slept with an older, possibly charismatic guy...raise your hand.

I suspect there are very few raised hands right now.

That's kind of the amusing thing, but also the shocking thing, about some of the reactions. There were people trying to come up with ways that these could be Gwen's kids, and they were suggesting -- as probable, workable solutions -- time travel, parallel dimensions, clones, a host of such ideas.

When it was suggested that she had them in the old fashioned way, by having sex, they said "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" Alternate worlds and parallel dimensions and time travel and cloning are possible...but the latter is not?

We handled the aging thing by indicating that the solution Norman used to become the Goblin, which gave him an accellerated healing factor, also affected his DNA, and in turn his children's DNA, in ways consisted with accelerated biology.

When this came out, the same small group went online to say that it would have been better if she had been raped than seduced. Better for a young woman to be raped? In what parallel universe does THAT rule exist?

A lot of this is about guys feeling guy-power threatened...the girlfriend who chooses to have sex with another guy...the woman who chooses to have sex rather than having a man impose sex on her...the woman who, once having become "damaged goods" (in the words of some posters) is now a whore, a tramp, and a slut.

I specifically point to guys in this because I have not, to date, seen one woman poster come out and say that what Gwen did was unrealistic. Or use the kinds of terms that the guys have used. Not one. I think that speaks volumes to the situation.

In the Gwen storyline, yes, I wanted it to be Peter's kids, Joe overrode that, which is his right as EIC. I got the flack for that decision, but them's the breaks.

In the current storyline, there's a lot that I don't agree with, and I made this very clear to everybody within shouting distance at Marvel, especially Joe. I'll be honest: there was a point where I made the decision, and told Joe, that I was going to take my name off the last two issues of the OMD arc. Eventually Joe talked me out of that decision because at the end of the day, I don't want to sabotage Joe or Marvel, and I have a lot of respect for both of those. As an executive producer as well as a writer, I've sometimes had to insist that my writers make changes that they did not want to make, often loudly so. They were sure I was wrong. Mostly I was right.

Sometimes I was wrong. But whoever sits in the editor's chair, or the executive producer's chair, wears the pointy hat of authority, and as Dave Sim once noted, you can't argue with a pointy hat.

Joe came to me with a storyline that had Peter meeting these twins, one of which looked just like Gwen that of course he would be attracted to. These kids would turn out to be kids that he had with Gwen. Peter, of course, had no knowledge of it and would have to deal with the ramifications. In my world, there was no way I could go forward with this story as is. For starters, you're talking to a guy that feels that a married Peter Parker isn't the healthiest thing for the franchise since it ages the character. There is no way on planet earth that I could let him to have kids, Marvel almost made that mistake several years ago. And there were further implications of the story that were out of my comfort zone. First, it was the dealing with the repercussions of Peter and Gwen having unprotected or careless sex out of wedlock. Second, it would be dealing with Peter having kids out of wedlock; while, of course, he wasn't aware of having had them, there was always the possibility that the media could spin it that way. But in the end, it was mostly the idea of Peter having kids that I just balked at.

I had to tell Joe straight up that there was no way we could do this story the way he wanted to do it, so I offered up the option of having someone else be the father, perhaps Norman. I guess the one place where my story differs from Joe is that once I gave Joe the suggestion for Norman, it was up to Joe as to whether he wanted to write that story or not. I didn't demand that he write it; if he felt that it was that bad an idea, he could have just have skipped it all together. This conversation happened before he began writing the arc, so it wasn't like we were shifting the ground on him mid story. So, yes, I came up with the idea of Norman and still stand by it, but I assumed Joe also thought it was a cool idea, he did all the research and came back with a methodology within continuity that made it work; it was pretty damn brilliant. He wrote the heck out of the story -- it's one of my favorites. I understand that fans give us flack for so many of the things that we do, but that's part of what comes with the territory of working on these very old, established icons.